Life Under Capitalism: Early Deaths a ‘Silver Lining’ for Corporations

Posted By
Pete Dolack
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August 22, 2017 @ 8:18 am
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Viewpoints |
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Participating in the August 14 demonstration at the Trump Tower in Manhattan, I couldn’t help thinking of the connections between a Bloomberg article proclaiming that people dying earlier contains a “silver lining” because corporations will save pension costs and the ongoing savagery of the Trump administration.

Not simply the naked symbiosis between the Trump administration and white supremacists, neo-Nazis and assorted far-right cranks — all too sadly on display in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend — but the alliance of corporate titans, Republican Party leaders and President Trump himself. The rush by even conservative congressional Republicans to condemn the tweeter-in-chief for his refusal to condemn his so-called “alt-right” allies for two days should not distract us from the Trump administration’s all-out assault on regulations, civil rights laws, health care and the environment. (Let’s please retire the useless term “alt-right” and call them what they are: white supremacists, fascists and fascist wannabes.)

The health care system of the United States is already by far the world’s most expensive[1] while delivering among the worst results. So of course the solution to this, in Republican eyes, is to make it worse. That effort has, so far, failed, thanks to massive grassroots activism. But plenty else is being rammed through under the radar through executive decrees — which is why we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for Congress to impeach President Trump. He’s much too useful to Republicans and corporate executives. Should that change, of course, all bets are off, but short a Democratic tidal wave in 2018 Republican members of Congress turning on the president anytime soon isn’t likely.

So what does this have to do with an article published by Bloomberg? The headline on this particular article says it all: “Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions[2],” complete with a subhead declaring “lower pension costs” a “silver lining.” As not only a proud member of the corporate media, but one specializing in delivering news to financiers and industrialists, extolling a benefit to corporate bottom lines and ignoring the, ahem, human cost of said benefit is only to be expected. The article is not at all atypical of the business press, even if this one is a little more obvious than usual.

But, as a friend who is an activist with a Marxist party but who once ran a chemical industry consultancy by day (if only his clients knew his politics!) once taught me, the business section is where they hide the news. So the point here isn’t the attitude of Bloomberg toward working people (no more hostile and sometimes less so than your average business publication) but the attitude of corporate titans toward employees. The article states:

“In 2015, the American death rate—the age-adjusted share of Americans dying—rose slightly for the first time since 1999. And over the last two years, at least 12 large companies, from Verizon to General Motors, have said recent slips in mortality improvement have led them to reduce their estimates for how much they could owe retirees by upward of a combined $9.7 billion, according to a Bloomberg analysis of company filings.”

Austerity costs human lives

Gains in U.S. death rates had been improving until 2009, Bloombergreports, citing a Society of Actuaries analysis, but those rates then flattened before reversing in 2015. This isn’t necessarily unique to the U.S. — the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the United Kingdom last month reported that U.S., Canadian and British seniors have ceased seeing longevity improvements[3], suggesting the impact of austerity since the 2008 economic collapse is a primary culprit. The Actuaries report said:

“The rising mortality rates among US working age demonstrates that the historical fall in mortality rates cannot be taken for granted. The pace of life expectancy gains of older ages has slowed down, with some age groups showing signs of increasing death rates. These signs should be taken as warnings that worsened health care, behaviour and environment can reverse decades of success in health and longevity. Actuaries need to have a better understanding of the drivers of longevity to consider how to incorporate recent experience into forecasts of future longevity.”

As welcome as a new quantification of the toll of austerity is, such a notion is far from new, nor is it simply the latest variant of capitalism, neoliberalism, that is at work here. The increased deprivation of capitalism caused a half-million U.S. deaths[4] from 1999 to 2015. Specifically, nearly half a million excess deaths have occurred since 1999 among middle-aged White non-Hispanic United Statesians, according to a paper published in 2015 by two Princeton University researchers, Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

From 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for U.S. Whites aged 45 to 54 fell by 2 percent per year on average, matching the average rate of decline in five comparison countries (Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany). But although, from 1999, other industrial countries continued to see a decline in mortality rates for the middle-aged, the U.S. White non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year, an increase that is unique, Drs. Case and Deaton reported. African-American death rates have not similarly risen although remain considerably higher than those for Whites.

The authors do not speculate on the reason for White deaths to increase in contrast to the trend of minority groups, but we might reasonably conclude that People of Color have had deprivation and economic difficulty imposed on them in greater numbers and more intensely, and thus are experiencing less of a change in historic circumstances than are Whites. The economic downturn that the world has lived through since 2008 certainly hasn’t bypassed People of Color — far from it — but the decline has not spared Whites, a group not as hardened to lower living standards thanks to their privileges.

Privatization costs human lives

Privatization and intensified reliance on “the market” has already been demonstrated to worsen health outcomes. A 2009 study published by The Lancet concluded that the mass privatization in the former Soviet bloc resulted in one million deaths[5]. Mass privatization caused the average number of deaths to increase by 13 percent from the 1992 onset of shock therapy. An Oxford University press release summarized these findings:

“David Stuckler, from Oxford’s Department of Sociology, said: ‘Our study helps explain the striking differences in mortality in the post-communist world. Countries which pursued rapid privatisation, or ‘shock therapy’, had much greater rises in deaths than countries which followed a more gradual path. Not only did rapid privatisation lead to mass unemployment but also wiped out the social safety nets, which were critical for helping people survive during this turbulent period.’ ”

During Soviet times, we were assured by Western commentators that high levels of alcoholism were a sign of despair in Russia, yet alcohol per-capita consumption rates in 2007 were three times that of 1990[6].

When a health care system is designed to deliver corporate profits rather than health care — and this is precisely what privatized health systems do — such are the results. Throwing more than 20 million people off the roles of health insurance, as all Republican Party plans would have done, could only have exacerbated poor health outcomes. But doing so is consistent with Republican plans to shred what remains of the U.S. social safety net, sure to lead to further early deaths. As the more reliable instruments of the will of corporate plutocrats (Democrats having to sometimes make concessions to their voting base), Republicans see Donald Trump in the White House as a gift.

The purported disapproval enunciated by the likes of Senator Jeff Flake are a sad joke — the Arizona Republican has reliably voted for all Trump appointees and legislation. What really “embarrasses” members of Congress are the president’s vulgarity and ham-fisted obviousness. He simply refuses to use code words that way that ordinary Republicans have learned to do. Stop being so obvious! But in reality President Trump is the logical product [7]of 37 years of Republican pandering — half a century if we go back to Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy.”

We can certainly argue over what constitutes fascism[8], and whether President Trump is properly called a fascist or that he is simply a Republican who is more willing to show the fist behind capitalist rule albeit someone who carries the seeds for a potential fascist movement. The latter is more than scary enough. But as the casual talk of a “silver lining” for shortened life spans illustrates, human life is expendable in the pursuit of profits under capitalism. And as long as the Trump administration is useful to this pursuit, occasional protests from corporate executives will remain no more than hollow gestures.